 There are over 2650 languages in the world plus over 7000 dialects. Deciding which language is the most difficult to learn may not be as simple as you may think. Different languages present different challenges, and what constitutes a difficult language depends a lot on the individual studying it. Show
Your mother tongue is an important deciding factor when it comes to difficulty. For example, native speakers of Italian seem to learn Spanish and Portuguese rather easily despite the complex grammatical structures of the Spanish language. On the same basis, Chinese speakers will probably pick up Japanese faster than people whose first language uses the Roman alphabet. In fact, Chinese has no grammatical system per se, which makes it easier to learn than many Western languages once you have memorized the basic characters. Individual aptitude is another factor. Some people have a natural talent for learning new languages, while others struggle through the basics. Factors such as environment, materials used, motivation, and even environment also play an important role in how difficult a language is to learn. All that aside, the British Foreign Office conducted a language study recently and concluded that the most difficult language to learn is Basque, spoken in parts of Spain and France, followed closely by Hungarian, which has 35 cases or noun forms. On the other hand, German and Russian languages use a punctuation system said to be among the most difficult ones in the world. Languages that use characters may seem hard to read and write to users of the Roman alphabet, but they are not always that difficult. Experts agree that Chinese and Korean can be learned rather easily by speakers of Western languages; Vietnamese and Japanese, however, are much more complex. While many native speakers seem to forget this, English is actually quite difficult to learn because of pronunciation issues and irregular verbs; in English, many words are spelled the same but sound different depending on the meaning. This makes the English language hard to understand even for people whose native tongue is a related language. By Last updated: February 24, 2022 Looking for a language that’s not gonna require 3-hour evening classes Monday through Friday for the next 10 years? There are so many languages out there that are arguably easier to pick up than others. So if you’re curious about the easiest languages to learn, we’ve got a few suggestions to help you out! Contents
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download) What Makes a Language Easy to Learn?There’s no such thing as one language that’s just plain easier than all the others, but there are a lot of languages that are way easier for you personally to learn. I travel all over the world and one thing I’ve noticed is that all 7 billion of us seem to have strong opinions on our native languages. Two people in the same country (even the same city!) will tell you with equal degrees of confidence that their language is super hard and super easy, that you’ll never learn it or that it’s a piece of cake. They’ll swear to you that English was a breeze to learn, or that it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done. What accounts for these huge differences in opinion? Two things: 1. There’s no such thing as a universally easy language. 2. The ease of a language depends on the learner. There are generally three major things that make a language easy or hard for any given learner: 1. How closely it’s related to the languages you already know. 2. How complex its system of sounds is. 3. How complicated its grammar is. Some learners struggle more to understand the strange sounds they hear coming out of noses and throats and rounded lips, and others would take a good French nasal vowel over German noun declensions any day of the week. Whatever your learning style is, here are 3 categories of easy languages for you to get started with. Keep in mind that many of the languages listed below can be found on most language learning apps. FluentU, for example, offers Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. If those are the languages that you’re interested in, then FluentU is a good option for them: It’s an intuitive language learning app full of authentic language videos, equipped with resourceful features like interactive subtitles and a video-based dictionary, making languages like Spanish and Chinese much more accessible, even to complete beginners. You Can’t Argue with Science: The 11 Easiest Languages to LearnLinguistic Neighbors: Languages Related to Your Native LanguageWanna see something cool? That is my house. It doesn’t take long to crack the code and figure out that these four lines say the same thing in closely related West Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, and Afrikaans, from top to bottom). Maybe some of the words for “that” are a bit more of a stretch, but how quickly do all the others fall into place when you look at them? This is what it’s like when you start learning a language related to your own. You’ll see cognates, or words that have a common origin and similar meanings, like little hints buried in a foreign language sentence. Learning the languages most closely related to your own is like learning with linguistic training wheels. Here are a few examples of languages that are child’s play for certain learners, depending on what languages they already know: 1. DutchEnglish’s first cousin, the only language more closely related to either one is Frisian. Dutch is full of English cognates—drinken (to drink), kat (cat), week (week), licht (light) and hundreds more. Once you’ve got the most basic fundamentals down, you should be more than ready for basic conversations and children’s books. 2. Haitian CreoleAre you a native French speaker, or have you held on to some high school French? Haitian Creole, one of the largest French creoles, is made up of a mostly French vocabulary mixed with indigenous flavors of the new world. 3. TagalogThe Philippines is not only one of the fastest-growing destinations for young expats—it’s also a country where Spanish speakers can learn the local tongue with ease. Everyday items are usually similar or exactly the same as the Spanish name. Don’t see anything familiar here? It’s okay. You don’t have to already know a big world language like English, French or Spanish to get started on some easy language learning. Unless you only speak a language isolate like Korean or Basque, there are plenty of long-lost linguistic cousins waiting for you to look them up and get in touch! Check resources like the Ethnologue to learn about your language’s family tree and what other tongues are most closely related to it. Effortless Phonology: Languages with Painless PronunciationHave you ever overheard a foreign language like Arabic or Cantonese and wondered how all those sounds even make up a real language? To some extent, this is just because the speech sounds of unfamiliar languages often sound garbled and meaningless to foreigners. But in terms of phonology (the system of speech sounds in a language), not all languages are made equal: Some have dozens of different consonants and vowels, and some have only a few.
Do French nasals or Arabic pharyngeals sound like linguistic nightmares? Don’t panic. If learning all the new sounds of a foreign language is your biggest challenge, you should consider starting with a language like one of these: 4. SpanishYou saw this one coming, right? Spanish is often the go-to language for Western learners because of its small inventory of speech sounds and user-friendly phonetic spelling system. In Spanish, a always sounds more or less like a (even with an accent mark), which we as learners really appreciate. Thanks, Spanish. 5. JapaneseJapanese has historically gotten bad PR among language learners, but its pronunciation is actually remarkably simple. Of its 19 consonants, only a couple are rare among world languages, and its five vowels are remarkably similar to those in Spanish. 6. ItalianIt’s got a few more vowels than its cousin down in Spain, but Italian’s big advantage is that most of its consonants and vowels are among the most common sounds found in world languages. That means most learners won’t find many words they can’t get their mouth around! To see what’s out there for you beyond these three, you could start with this list of world languages ordered by number of phonemes (distinct speech sounds) to get an idea of which languages are more phonologically difficult than others. Keep in mind that most of the extremes (languages with very many or very few phonemes) are very old, very isolated languages that might not be easy or practical to learn, but you can still use the tool to compare whether Greek or Russian is your best choice. Goodbye Grammar Book: Languages with Simple StructuresJust like some languages love to play with diverse and complicated sounds, some seem to have an endless love affair with rules and grammar. I’ve always shied away from German for this reason. Its four noun cases, infinite list of adjective declensions and word order rules are enough to send me running to the nearest biergarten. Other languages, thankfully, aren’t quite so strict and demanding. You learn some vocabulary and a few basic usage rules, and you’re good to go. Here are some of those languages: 7. Mandarin ChineseThis is probably the first time you’ve seen Chinese on a list of easy languages, right? That’s a shame, because structurally speaking, it’s a cinch. Almost every word of Mandarin has one and just one meaning. It also generally follows a subject-verb-object word order, common to most of the world’s larger languages, so no new tricky syntax for most learners. 8. AfrikaansWe mentioned Dutch above, but Afrikaans is like a grammatically boiled-down version of its parent language. Whereas Dutch demands verb conjugations like those in English—for instance, I am, you are, it is—Afrikaans doesn’t bother you with the details. In South Africa it’s ek is (I am), jy is (you are), sy is (she is). What could be easier? 9. MalayThe language is known regionally as Indonesian or Malaysian totals around 270 million total speakers, making it both one of the largest and fastest-growing world languages. Even better, it has no grammatical categories for gender, number or tense. Basically, you learn one form of a word, and you can use it just about whenever you want. 10. EsperantoThis language was invented by some linguists who were also great global citizens, and even though it’s “made up,” its 2 million speakers, several hundred thousand Wikipedia articles, and organizations worldwide would argue that it still counts. Esperanto was designed with you in mind: Minimal grammar, easy rules and as a bonus, lots of things that resemble many other world languages. I confess: I hate learning grammar. It’s not just me, right? If you’re a free-spirited language learner who can’t be bothered with the details, then go for one of these simply structured languages. 11. Bonus Easy Language: EnglishLearners across the globe seem to have extreme feelings towards English—it’s the hardest or the easiest language they’ve ever learned, they love it or they hate it. But as we’ve referenced here and there throughout this post, linguistically speaking, it falls somewhere around the fiftieth percentile. My mother tongue has some difficult sounds like interdental th, some phrasal verbs that admittedly make no sense and a spelling system that makes even less sense. But in general, English doesn’t have a lot of inflections, so there’s no messy grammar and most, though not all, of its sounds will be familiar to speakers of other languages. But there’s one other factor that makes English in many ways the easiest language of them all. It’s absolutely everywhere. You can’t avoid it. Open up your browser, turn on the television, travel to any major city across the globe, and you’d need heavy-duty earplugs to avoid hearing the Anglo takeover. It’s often difficult to learn less widely-spoken languages like Danish, Turkish or Thai, but English decided a while back that it’s kind of done with national borders, which is good news for language learners. With the wealth of English language media on just YouTube and Wikipedia alone, you hardly need to look anywhere else. Even better: English speakers are absolutely everywhere, which means you’ve always got a conversation partner! You can’t reasonably hope to bump into Hungarian speakers often enough to keep up your language skills outside Hungary, but with English, opportunities to practice are nearly infinite. So What’s the Easiest Language to Learn?By now, you can probably guess that there’s no such thing. Some of the languages with the fewest speech sounds are the most remote and grammatically complex. Others entirely lack tenses or cases or inflections of any kind and are riddled with guttural sounds nearly impossible for speakers of most languages to pronounce. More than anything, it depends on your mother tongue and the languages you already know. And you also must take into account the sociological and international significance of a language: How much media is available in the language, and how many other speakers are there for you to reasonably practice with? The easiest language for a native Spanish speaker to learn will be totally different than the easiest language for a native Vietnamese speaker, and it can even differ vastly between two native English speakers from the same region but who have different learning styles. With the resources and some of the examples given in this post, you should be able to get started identifying your low-hanging linguistic fruits. No matter how busy you are or how difficult you think it’ll be, there’s a language out there for everyone! What do you find challenging about learning a language? Is it the new sounds, the grammar rules, finding chances to practice or something else? Jakob is a full-time traveler, obsessive language learner, and dedicated language teacher. He writes about language, travel and the many places they meet on the road at his blog Globalect. Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download) Is English hard for Spanish speakers to learn?Is English difficult for Spanish speakers? The most straightforward answer to this question is “yes”, simply because learning any new language can be tough! It's easier for Spanish speakers to learn other Romance languages (e.g., Italian, Portuguese, French).
What's the easiest language to learn if you know Spanish?
If you know a little bit of Spanish, Portuguese is one of the easiest languages to pick up. They're so similar that native Portuguese speakers can often understand Spanish speakers without having learned Spanish at all.
Is Russian hard to learn for Spanish speakers?The reason why we've listed Russian as one of those languages that Spanish native speakers find it hard to learn, find out in the following lines. Cases. Cases are something that gives headaches not only Spanish native speakers but others as well. Every Slavic language has cases, and in Russian, there are six of them.
What is the hardest language to learn for speakers?The Hardest Languages To Learn For English Speakers. Mandarin Chinese. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. ... . Arabic. ... . Polish. ... . Russian. ... . Turkish. ... . Danish.. |
What is the hardest language to learn for spanish speakers
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